The Questions of Tissametteyya

Reading guide

The discourse in one sentence

Tissametteyya, the second of Bāvarī's sixteen students, asks who in the world is truly content, undisturbed, and able to hold to a middle way without getting stuck; the Buddha answers by describing someone who lives the spiritual life even among sensual pleasures, free of craving and ever mindful, and calls that person “a great man” who has “escaped the seamstress.”

The frame: the second of sixteen questions

As told in full in Snp 5.1, the aged brahmin teacher Bāvarī sent sixteen of his finest students — Ajita, Tissametteyya, Puṇṇaka, Mettagū, Dhotaka, Upasīva, Nanda, Hemaka, Todeyya, Kappa, Jatukaṇṇī, Bhadrāvudha, Udaya, Posāla, Mogharāja, and Piṅgiya — to find the newly awakened Buddha and question him directly. Ajita went first, in Snp 5.2; Tissametteyya, named second in Bāvarī's list, follows immediately here, at the same gathering, with his own distinct question.

Who is content, and who has no disturbances

Tissametteyya's question is compact but layered: who here in the world is content? Who has no disturbances? What thoughtful person, having known both ends, is not stuck in the middle? Who is called a great man, and who has “escaped the seamstress”? Four questions folded into two verses, all pointing toward the same figure — someone who has resolved whatever tension the “two ends” represent (elsewhere in early Buddhist texts, this phrase is often read as the pull between indulgence and self-denial, or between any pair of opposed extremes) without becoming caught between them.

The spiritual life in the midst of sensual pleasures

The Buddha's answer is unexpected in its phrasing: such a person leads “the spiritual life among sensual pleasures,” not apart from them. The point is not that pleasures are absent from this person’s world, but that craving toward them is gone — “rid of craving, ever mindful,” a mendicant “who, after appraisal, is quenched.” That state, the Buddha says, is exactly what having “no disturbances” means.

A great man who has “escaped the seamstress”

The final verse answers the remaining two questions directly: that same person, having known both ends without being stuck in the middle, is the one the Buddha calls “a great man,” and is the one who has “escaped the seamstress.” The image of a seamstress — stitching things together, binding them — works as a figure for craving's habit of sewing a person back into repeated existence, one attachment stitched to the next. To escape the seamstress is to have nothing left that can be sewn.

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